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For about three weeks, Reza Pahlavi, the sixty-five-year-old son of the deposed Shah of Iran, appeared to be the most obvious figure to lead an overthrow of the Islamic Republic. The protests that broke out across the country at the end of December were triggered by the collapse of the rial and exorbitant inflation in food prices. But they soon came to target the whole theocracy and its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On January 6th, Pahlavi sought to seize the moment, issuing a video message in which he called on Iranians to join together and chant slogans against the regime from their homes and in the streets. Two days later, Iran witnessed an unprecedented wave of protests, with demonstrations held in more than a hundred and fifty cities. In the capital, streams of people converged on overpasses and boulevards, calling not just for the end of the regime but for the return of Pahlavi himself, chanting “Long live the Shah.”

For years, Pahlavi had presented himself as a unifying figure, in keeping with a tradition of Iranian kingship as the glue that had held the fractious Persian Empire together. His strategists, ancien-régime figures who had surrounded him for nearly thirty years, believed that an inclusive approach would showcase his ability to lead and secure potential backers in the U.S. and in Europe. As recently as 2022, Pahlavi was trying to work within the often quarrelsome sphere of Iranian diaspora politics. During the Women, Life, Freedom movement that fall, prominent activists in Washington, D.C., were vying to take credit for sparking the nationwide protests. When a coalition of figures assembled at a Georgetown University forum, in February, 2023, the former Crown Prince sat humbly in a row of eight, alongside two actresses, a soccer player, and an Iranian Kurdish separatist.

Various strands of the opposition—ethnic minorities, leftists, and educated technocrats—appeared determined to block him, even at the price of leaving the regime in place. By then, Pahlavi was surrounded by a younger entourage of analysts and advisers, some of whom were brash figures once associated with the country’s reformist student movement. “I could imagine his advisers telling him, ‘You’re the King. You can’t surround yourself with people who don’t even acknowledge or respect your station,’ ” an Iranian analyst in Washington told me.

That April, two months after the Georgetown event, Pahlavi announced on X that he would no longer align himself with any single dissident group, a gesture that effectively positioned him as a leader of the opposition above all others. “When I was serving as his strategic counsellor, his philosophy was ‘Today, only unity,’ ” Mehrdad Youssefiani, who served as Pahlavi’s chief of staff for seventeen years, said. “Now his social-media presence projects the image ‘Today only me.’ To the critical audiences he needs to draw into his coalition, that’s an imperial posture that belies all his rhetoric of inclusive coalition.”

During the next two years, Pahlavi expanded his operation and deepened his ties with Israel. In 2023, he visited Jerusalem, where he posed for photos with Benjamin Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, and visited Yad Vashem and the Wailing Wall. Pahlavi’s embrace of Israel risked alienating some of his potential supporters in Iran, but it also aligned him with a country committed to the destruction of the Islamic Republic which could also help him gain traction with policymakers in the U.S. By 2025, Gila Gamliel, the Israeli minister of science and technology, was saying to the press that she and Pahlavi had discussed a peace accord that would follow the fall of the Iranian regime “next year in Tehran.”

In early January, state security forces used military-style weapons to kill thousands of protesters, exhibiting a level of violence that shocked even the regime’s most hardened opponents. The state was already on the verge of economic collapse, and Donald Trump, in close coördination with Israel, seemed intent on launching a military confrontation. Pahlavi’s team began putting out various plans to further erode the regime’s authority, calling on workers to strike and releasing a QR code through which defectors in the state security forces could sign on to his project, which Pahlavi claimed had elicited fifty thousand responses. At the same time, one of his advisers issued a blanket threat to Iranians inside the country who were “accomplices” to the regime: “You’re done for. Every last one of you.” If the U.S. had started conducting air strikes that week, delivering the support that Trump had promised the protesters, the demonstrations might have continued to grow.

Instead, the U.S. President slowly dispatched his armada to the Middle East, while his envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, held negotiations with Iranian officials. The regime was given weeks to regroup. Iranians retreated from the streets. Pahlavi, stuck in limbo, became less affable, more combative. At the Munich Security Conference, which Pahlavi attended in mid-February, two hundred thousand people converged on the city for a pro-Pahlavi demonstration. “Millions of Iranians chanted my name and called for my return,” he said. The calls were effectively a mandate “to be the leader of this transition as they have asked for.”

When Israel launched its attack on Iran, on February 28th, it called the campaign Operation Roaring Lion, seemingly a nod to the Iranian monarchy. But a U.S. intelligence report, assembled prior to the events of early January, which was shown to Trump a week before the start of the war, concluded that Pahlavi lacked a sufficient network inside the country to lead an overthrow of the regime. “They never took him that seriously,” Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said of the Administration. “There’s a difference between having an organization on the ground versus just having people who like you. If you’re going to help change a regime, you have to have a ground game.” Trump and his aides began referring to Pahlavi as the “loser prince.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and his wife, Empress Farah, disagreed sharply on nearly every aspect of their son’s upbringing. The Shah, who wished to prepare Reza for his future role, believed that he should be tutored by tough military figures and immersed in Iranian society. The Empress preferred a more cloistered upbringing, with French nannies and hand-selected schoolmates. At one point, according to the published diaries of the Shah’s former court minister, Asadollah Alam, Reza was in the alarming thrall of Mademoiselle Joelle, his French governess, who filled his head with French history. “I heard the boy wanted to go hunting, but the French woman told him no—killing animals and birds is wrong,” Alam reported disapprovingly. Even small decisions, such as how the teen-age prince should commute to school—driving himself or chauffeured in a bulletproof Mercedes—held implications for the man Reza would become. “Better that he takes risks than that he ends up a shrinking violet like Ahmad Shah Qajar,” the Shah told his courtier, referring to the effete final monarch of the preceding dynasty.

Reza was eighteen when the Islamic Revolution overthrew his family’s reign, in 1979. At the time, he was at fighter-pilot training in Lubbock, Texas, part of his preparations for becoming a modern king. The Pahlavis, in exile, were vilified, but the family still appeared duty-bound to project the image of Reza as the dynastic heir of Iranian monarchy. The Empress, based between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Paris, remained socially enmeshed in Europe’s royal circles, but Reza stayed in the United States, completing a degree at the University of Southern California, and then living a suburban existence in Potomac, Maryland. On a podcast in 2023, he admitted that, despite having always insisted that he was fighting to unseat the regime, he never envisioned returning to Iran permanently. “My children live here,” he said. “My friends live here. Everybody that I know is here. If I was to go back, what do I go back to?”

In the early eighties, when Pahlavi was in his twenties, Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s last Ambassador to the U.S., brokered meetings between Pahlavi and American officials. “The Americans at the time were quite hopeful they could get some results with Reza, but they soon lost confidence in him,” Tino Zahedi, one of Ardeshir’s cousins, told me. “They didn’t believe he could reign.” In the following years, reports emerged of Pahlavi accepting funds and support from the C.I.A. and from various Arab monarchies to run his small-scale political operations. (Pahlavi has always denied this.) Ardeshir Zahedi eventually parted with him, saying in later years that accepting financial backing from foreigners and essentially asking them to drop bombs on their own country was un-Iranian.

For years, Pahlavi kept up appearances, insisting that he was the rightful Crown Prince of Iran, refusing to acknowledge the abolition of the Pahlavi monarchy, and releasing messages to the nation at the Persian New Year. But he was not a decisive political figure. To those who knew his father, he cut a strange figure, neither common nor majestic but a suburban man of Maryland who shopped at the mall and attended a weekly poker game in Bethesda. He seemed resigned to exile and uncertain about the prospect of changing Iranians’ minds from afar. “He’s a good person, but he’s indolent, and he knows it himself,” an Iranian insider in Washington who knew Pahlavi in the eighties said.

In 2001, I interviewed Pahlavi for Time, and found him impressive. I was based in Tehran at the time, as an American-born foreign correspondent, and most of the Islamic Republic officials I met were slovenly, undereducated, and lecherous. Some were downright sinister; others piously refused to look women in the eye. Next to them, Pahlavi seemed dignified, well informed, and worldly. My abiding memories of the encounter were just how normal and decent he seemed, qualities that seemed precious inside Iran, where nothing was remotely decent or normal.

The country, meanwhile, was experiencing a series of convulsions. Various reform and feminist movements were pushing the regime to soften its militant foreign policy, its oppressive dress codes, and its censorship of civil society. In 2009, when an election was stolen from a reformist candidate and handed to a hard-liner, millions of people marched peacefully in the streets. In response, the regime killed dozens, and arrested and tortured many more. A young generation born after the Revolution learned that modest, internal change would never come.

The following year, a London-based television network called Manoto began broadcasting directly to Iran in Persian. The network had secured access to the vast pre-revolutionary archive of Iranian state radio and television, allowing it to produce a sophisticated stream of content—documentaries, bio-pics, concerts—that elided the authoritarian grip of the Shah’s rule and highlighted the wealth and promise of pre-revolutionary Iran. It quickly became one of the most watched channels in the country. Seven years later, Iran International, a well-funded, pro-Pahlavi news network, emerged in London. Today, it covers Pahlavi’s every move with near-reverence. “Big money went into weaponizing the Iranian population through these networks,” Nasr said. “And Reza Pahlavi was the beneficiary. They created mass nostalgia for that era and positioned him as the person who could take Iranians back there.”

One of the great challenges of the Islamic Republic was how to reconcile its Islamist project with Iran’s history. For nearly twenty-five centuries, the Persian Empire and the modern nation-state of Iran had been ruled through monarchy. The ancient idea of Iran was that of a distinct people bound together within a distinct empire, protected and led by shahs conferred with farr, a subtle concept that the Yale historian Abbas Amanat has described as “kingly charisma divinely bestowed upon a ruler of the right quality.” The king was “the shadow of God on earth,” but he could also lose his farr, if he failed to defend the kingdom or if he ruled as a tyrant.

From the start, the denigration of the Iranian monarchy was at the center of the Islamic Republic’s official ideology. Bulldozers and dynamite demolished the modernist mausoleum of Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Tile work and court paintings at historical sites were vandalized, the eyes of past royals gouged out. Villains in state-produced dramas bore the names of past kings. The Revolution’s language of Islamist class struggle fixated on Iran’s recent kings as stooges of Western imperialism. (“One strand of hair on the head of a slum dweller is more honorable than a thousand hairs on the head of a palace dweller,” the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, often said.) But, in time, Khomeini and the Revolution’s other leaders ascended to the same mansions in north Tehran that they had confiscated from the élite of the Shah’s era.

Celebrating monarchy became an oblique language of protest. In the fall of 2016, thousands of people converged at Pasargadae, the ancient city containing the tomb of Cyrus the Great, near Shiraz. Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, is remembered by Iranians for his enlightened and tolerant rule. The gatherers chanted pro-monarchy slogans, including wishes of happy birthday to Pahlavi, who was born around the same day in October that Cyrus is said to have conquered Babylon. The organizers were arrested and denounced by authorities as counter-revolutionaries. In the years since, security forces have turned people away from ancient Persian burial sites on commemorative days. Qajar-dynasty kitsch—kings with walrus mustaches and embellished turbans, women with unibrows in tunics—became ubiquitous as a motif in contemporary art, on the walls of cafés, on teapots. To this day, kingship suffuses Iranian literature and mythology.

The Shah’s regime, in repressing its political opponents, had overlooked the dissident clergy and Islamists, believing that secular leftists formed its most dangerous threat; similarly, the theocracy had fixated on everyone—liberal intellectuals, reformists, labor leaders, feminist activists—except ordinary Iranians gravitating toward Reza Pahlavi. In January, when the regime realized that Pahlavi was able to mobilize Iranians inside the country, it resorted to a bloodbath. Teen-agers born thirty years after the end of his father’s reign were shot and killed for chanting his name. An estimated seven thousand people were killed (with more than eleven thousand deaths under investigation), upward of twenty-five thousand were injured, and more than fifty thousand were arrested. Security forces entered hospitals and shot injured protesters at close range. The darkest moment in Iran’s recent history brought Pahlavi into direct confrontation with the regime that had long ignored him.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is now the ultimate test for Pahlavi’s standing. He has called the attack “a humanitarian rescue mission,” even as the daytime sky of Tehran has been blackened out by smoke from bombings on oil facilities. A strike on the first day of the war killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them children, at a girls’ school in Minab; Pahlavi has so far not commented on the event. One of his top aides, Saeed Ghasseminejad, has identified in interviews and on social media critical oil and gas infrastructure that could be destroyed in the war. Many of those sites have since been hit. On March 10th, Iran’s police chief said, “From now on, if someone acts at the enemy’s behest, we will no longer consider them as a protester or anything of the sort but as the enemy.” His officers, he warned, “have their fingers on the trigger.” Four days later, Pahlavi called on the “Valiant Heroes of the Immortal Guard”—cells of armed loyalists inside the country—to attack the regime’s apparatus of repression, declaring that “help has arrived.”

Netanyahu and Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, have said that the bombardment of not just Iranian military sites but also security and law-enforcement targets will “create the conditions” for the Iranian people to complete the job of overthrowing the regime. But the past three weeks have made clear that air strikes alone are not likely to achieve that goal. “From Israel’s point of view, as long as Iran is weak, it doesn’t matter if it becomes a failed state or a disintegrated state,” Raz Zimmt, the director of the Iran program at the Institute for National Security Studies, in Tel Aviv, told me. Netanyahu, commenting on the absence of an organized Iranian resistance, has all but expressed such indifference. “You can lead someone to water,” he said on March 12th. “You cannot make him drink.”

Trump, when asked whether Pahlavi was an option to become the next leader of Iran, said, “I guess he is. Some people like him.” But, the President went on, “it would seem to me that somebody from within might . . . maybe would be more appropriate.” Pahlavi, in turn, has seemed to tailor his public comments for Trump’s benefit. During a recent appearance on Fox News, he warned that Iranians “are not going to settle for anything that is a remnant of this system,” and that anything less than a full transition to democracy dictated by Iranians would lead to further chaos and instability. At the same time, he has thanked the U.S. President for his “humanitarian intervention.” “Iranian society is fracturing,” Nasr told me. “The fights are not over whether you support or oppose the Islamic Republic but whether your hatred for the regime is stronger than the love of your country.” Pahlavi, he said, “has basically fallen right through that fissure.”

Pahlavi remains the most prominent figure among the various dissidents jockeying for a leadership role in a post-Islamic Republic Iran. But, despite his seemingly good intentions, the pounding of Iran’s cities, the bombing of its palaces and cultural heritage sites, the food and gas shortages, the toxic smoke-filled skies, the dead schoolchildren, and the buzz of low-flying drones overhead all risk transforming his image from the leader of a unified future to the agent of his country’s ruin. In the ancient kingship tradition, endangering the empire would cause a king to lose his farr. No monarch in two and a half millennia of Persian history has invited a foreign power to attack the land of Iran, and nowhere in the long literary tradition of royal counsel—known as andarznameh, or “mirror for princes”—has an exception been made for the cause of ending domestic tyranny. This is the current predicament of Pahlavi, whose royal charisma has never been more on the line. ♦

Wanna humanize? I could come over later, bring a few beers, and we could, you know, get down to some serious humanizing. Hard to resist, these days, given what’s at stake. For students with assignments to complete, who have already vanquished their desolation by asking ChatGPT to compose an essay on their behalf, a humanizer is an A.I. tool that takes what has been produced, puts it through a further digital mill, and makes it sound as if it had emerged from a verifiable person. Among the companies that offer such tools are StealthWriter, HIX AI, and QuillBot. (If Nabokov had written science fiction, his villain would have been called Quillbot.) Anyone who has buttered and blitzed a mountain of mashed potatoes into a purée will understand. It’s hard to live with the lumps.

What I find charming about the humanizers is how human they are—that is, with what cheerful candor they proceed on the assumption that, as fallen beings, we have no option but to cheat. Not only can we not think for ourselves, or write by ourselves; we really can’t help ourselves, either, so here comes technology to spare us the pain. As for the notion that we might forgo A.I. in the first place, relying instead on our own wits, and that such self-sufficiency might even be good for us, forget it. That’s like suggesting we learn to ride a penny-farthing, inhaling the sweet scents of the hedgerows as we pedal along.

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One of the knottiest problems in this vexing new field of endeavor concerns the relationship between A.I. and plagiarism. It could be argued that the two are nearly identical, given that artificial intelligence scrapes up immeasurably vast amounts of online data, like those trawlers that scour the seabed for shrimp and flatfish with weighted nets, and to hell with the natural habitat. A chatbot is not (or not yet) an individual, and therefore bears no moral responsibility, but to lay hold of what it delivers, and to pass it off as one’s own work, could be construed as handling stolen goods. That, at any rate, is a viewpoint that prevails at some of the sturdier colleges in the United States. The most robust that I have come across is San José State University, where the advice offered by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library is admirably clear: “It doesn’t matter which AI program/software you use. Using any of these to write your papers is considered a form of plagiarism.”

What plagiarism is and has been, and what it may be in the process of becoming, are questions addressed by Roger Kreuz in a bouncy new book titled “Strikingly Similar” (Cambridge). He defines plagiarism as “the deliberate appropriation of someone else’s words and ideas without acknowledgement or compensation.” Words and ideas? That’s quite a bundle. Also, as Kreuz rightly asks, how many words? Or, indeed, how many musical notes? He offers a peculiar example: when the Chiffons sang three notes, in a simple descent, at the start of their 1963 hit “He’s So Fine,” written by Ronnie Mack, few listeners foresaw that the sequence would form the nub of a legal dispute that would, absurdly, not be concluded until 1998. The issue was whether, when George Harrison sang the words “My sweet Lord,” in the 1970 song of that title, he was recalling, borrowing, swiping, unwittingly echoing, or accidentally mimicking Mack’s melodic phrase. The fact that the two songs were atmospherically far apart—the ex-Beatle robed his harmonies with a chant of “Hare Krishna”—was beside the point. To the victim, a transcendental thief is still a thief.

What kind of victim are you, though, when somebody summons the nerve to plagiarize you? You are physically intact. You haven’t lost a wallet, a diamond necklace, or a child. There could be a dent in your artistic pride, but it’s unlikely to hurt as much as a stubbed toe. Privately, you might even feel a trifle smug—flattered that your stuff should merit larceny. Maybe that is why neither Harrison nor any other Beatle was moved to protest when the spiky and urgent bass riff that introduces “Taxman,” on “Revolver,” appeared more or less intact at the start of “Start!,” the fifth track on “Sound Affects,” a 1980 album by the Jam. According to Bruce Foxton, the Jam’s bassist, “it wasn’t intentional, but ‘Taxman’ subconsciously went in.” As it happens, Foxton’s explanation comes uncannily close to the 1976 ruling of a New York judge, Richard Owen, who asserted that, although Harrison’s use of “He’s So Fine” had not been deliberate, “his subconscious knew it already.” Spooky.

It’s hardly news that the subconscious can exact a heavy cost, though even Freud would have raised an eyebrow at the amount—more than two million dollars—that Owen ordered Harrison to pay. (The amount was later reduced, but that was not, by a long stretch, the end of the affair.) So, given the resemblance, why weren’t the Jam in a pickle? Well, the Beatles didn’t need the money, even after paying what they considered too much in taxes, and it could be that homage, blatant or otherwise, struck them as their rightful due. Rare was the creative artist, post-1970, who wasn’t churned up by bobbing in the Beatles’ wake. Kreuz doesn’t mention the Jam in his book, but he does usher us through the Harrison case, arriving at a crux that will, God willing, never be neatly resolved:

If the unconscious mind has no statute of limitations, then it becomes difficult to draw a bright line between appropriation on the one hand and inspiration on the other.

Anybody who embarks on a study of plagiarism hoping for bright lines is in for a foggy shock. Here is the land of blur. Only intermittently in “Strikingly Similar” does an act of plagiarism stand out as conscious, unambiguous, and proud. If the book has a hero, it is a great man named Alfred J. Carter, whom Kreuz describes as “an unemployed welder,” and who, in 1949, “was caught when he tried to sell a Wordsworth poem to Good Housekeeping.” Which poem, and why did the killjoys at the magazine turn it down? Weren’t readers crying out for tips on how to make their daffodils golden and hostly? The more poetry that could be smuggled under their noses, by whatever means, the better their skill at keeping house. Earth has not anything to show more fair than the crust on a chicken potpie.

The range of “Strikingly Similar,” according to the subtitle, runs “from Chaucer to Chatbots.” The emphasis, however, is heavily on modern times. We get nothing of Samuel Johnson, who, while declaring plagiarism to be “one of the most reproachful, though, perhaps, not the most atrocious of literary crimes,” in an essay from 1753, was also typically generous in his plea for mitigation: “A coincidence of sentiment may easily happen without any communication, since there are many occasions in which all reasonable men will nearly think alike.” On the other hand, we do get Boris Johnson, who, it is alleged, based a 2019 Twitter thread on a lawyer’s anonymous blog post. Such is the glorious age in which we dwell.

There is a rough story line that relates to plagiarism, which goes as follows. Plagiaristic mischief did not exist—or, at least, did not exert such a grip on the collective conscience—before the Romantic era, with its pesky insistence upon “originality.” Before then, it was deemed not just defensible but natural that a person bent on creative deeds would proceed via imitation: you studied your models, learning to copy them and thus whetting the edge of your skill. Only then were you qualified to venture upon work of your own devising, which would, needless to say, continue to show evidence of its predecessors.

Staid though it sounds, this process bequeathed to us, in bulk, an unmanageable wealth of beautiful objects. At first glance, Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin,” from 1504, is pretty much a straight rehash of the same subject as painted in the preceding years by Perugino, to whom Raphael had been apprenticed. But a hundred glances, or more, are needed to calibrate what has changed: the way in which the presiding priest, mid-frame, cocks his head and animates the hitherto chilly symmetry of the composition; the elaborating of the temple behind him, with figures now filling two of its arches; and the tense spectacle of a suitor breaking a staff across his knee in frustration at being supplanted by Joseph. You find yourself bracing for the snap. (In the earlier painting, he bends the staff feebly over his thigh.) Was Perugino, the master overtaken by his pupil, similarly tempted to smash something? Or did he applaud this smooth showpiece of the imitative system at work? We don’t know. One thing he didn’t do, for sure, is take Raphael to court and sue his sneaky ass.

Jump ahead a hundred years or so, to 1602, and we find an Englishman named Thomas Lodge receiving an M.D. from Oxford University. He was a well-travelled soul, who had been as far as Brazil, and the author of “Rosalynde,” a popular proto-novel, bedecked with incident, and reputedly written at sea. It had been published in 1590; was Lodge now aware that it had, in the meantime, been ransacked for a recent play, “As You Like It”? There are imponderables here: we lack conclusive evidence that the play was even staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Nonetheless, there is no denying its piracy of the prose tale. True, Shakespeare had added the characters of Touchstone and Jacques, thus mocking the sport of love and misting it in disillusionment; but most of the plot is pure Lodge. If, by our standard, that is glaring plagiarism, the obvious retort is that the standard of the early seventeenth century was a very different beast. How different, though?

At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own.

That is part of a sonnet by Ben Jonson, titled “On Poet-Ape.” It appeared in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. Whether or not the poem is about Shakespeare is a cause for scholarly debate, but what rises from it is anger. Jonson directs his scorn not only at plagiarists but at the average fool (“the sluggish gaping auditor”) who swallows their deceit. The same impatience lingers and spreads, thirty years later, through “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” (1646), a treatise by Sir Thomas Browne, who issues a peppery demand—“I wish men were not still content to plume themselves with others Feathers”—and makes the important point that we are dealing less with an annoying fad than with a permanent crack in human nature. “Plagiarie had not its Nativity with Printing, but began in times when thefts were difficult,” he writes.

“You used to think my racist hate-filled tweets were the cutest thing.”

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In the light of such plaints, maybe we need to adjust the established narrative. There have always been picky souls, it seems, who do find fault with plagiarism, and who refuse to shrug it off as reverent emulation. It would be a mistake, certainly, to regard the miasmic anxiety that swirls around the subject of current plagiarism, facilitated by A.I., as unique to us; the technology is unprecedented, but not the temper. For a healthy perspective, I recommend a little time travel. Try Robert Macfarlane’s “Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (2007)—a dazzling dive into late-Romantic attitudes—or, for a longer journey, Scott McGill’s “Plagiarism in Latin Literature” (2012), which makes today’s plagiarists, and their enemies, look like milksops. I like the sound of Quintus Octavius Avitus, who apparently devoted eight volumes to showing what a chronic plagiarist Virgil was. Virgil! The historian Sallust, meanwhile, was lampooned by a guy named Lenaeus as “lastaurum et lurconem et nebulonem popinonemque,” which McGill translates as “catamite, glutton, scoundrel, barfly.” But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that he was a plagiarist.

One of the pleasing facets of plagiarism is that it doesn’t exist—not in the eyes of the law, that is, and especially not if those eyes are American. There is intellectual-property law, and a law that prohibits the trafficking of counterfeit goods. There are laws against copyright infringement. If plagiarists are sent to prison, however, it will not be because they have filched a slice of poetry, or half a juicy ballad, and passed it off as their own. Plagiarism, pace Dr. Johnson, is not a crime. It is a sin.

In the mind of the plagiarized, as often as not, what has been perpetrated is nothing less than an outrage. When the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison watched James Cameron’s “The Terminator” (1984), he decided that the opening scene, of futuristic warriors battling in a broken landscape, with lasers blazing, was and could only be a ripoff of “Soldier,” a twenty-year-old episode of “The Outer Limits” whose script he had written. Charges were levelled. The studio behind the movie, Orion Pictures, settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, and, since then, the end credits of the film have displayed the uneasy wording “Acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison.” An unhappy Cameron was quoted as saying, “It was a real bum deal, I had nothing to do with it and I disagree with it,” though at least he had the satisfaction of seeing his movie improve a thousandfold on the TV show. As far as the law is concerned, though, bum deals are a twilight zone.

Someone who has pondered such niceties is Richard Posner, a former circuit judge and a prolific legal scholar. Rarely is Posner unamused, you sense, by the briars of confusion through which he undertakes to cut a path, and “The Little Book of Plagiarism” (2007) finds him at his most incisive. We get hushed in-jokes (“judicial acknowledgement of ghost authorship by law clerks is vanishingly rare”), plus knuckle raps for his peers (“judges will sometimes call copyright infringers ‘plagiarists,’ though there is no concealment”), but what lends the book its kick is the unwearying zest with which Posner defines and redefines his terms until they agree, for the moment, to hold still. He proposes that one way to treat plagiarism is as “nonconsensual fraudulent copying,” and the phrase, though it stumbles rather than trips off the tongue, strikes me as usefully cautious.

Now and then, Posner branches out from the main line of his thesis into the psychology of plagiarism—the motives both of those who fall into it, as if it were an addiction, and of those who expose it. “By far the most common punishments for plagiarism outside the school setting have nothing to do with law,” he writes. “They are disgrace, humiliation, ostracism, and other shaming penalties imposed.” Why should this be? In part, according to Posner, because plagiarism is “embarrassingly second rate; its practitioners are pathetic, almost ridiculous.” By this token, the politician who steals scraps of another’s rhetoric (even if the actual stealing is performed by speechwriters) is derided as if he had been found watching pornography. I would go further than Posner and suggest that it’s precisely because there are no plagiarism laws that the surrounding area is such a free-for-all. Without the barriers of legislation, the brawl spills out of control.

In the absence of cops, you get vigilantes, and Kreuz has a fine chapter, “The Plagiarism Hunters,” that details the thrilling activities of the truth-tracking industry. This has become quite the rage since Posner’s book came out, almost twenty years ago. We learn of a graduating senior at Parkersburg High School, in West Virginia, who discovered that a commencement address given, in 2019, by the principal, Kenneth DeMoss, bore an ominous resemblance to a speech delivered by Ashton Kutcher “in accepting Nickelodeon’s 2013 Teen Choice Ultimate Choice Award.” And you thought Virgil was a crook. DeMoss was suspended for five whole days without pay, we learn, while his accuser was attacked for ratting him out. (Such minor-league meanness begs to wind up in a novel.) Kreuz neglects to tell us whether Kutcherology studies have since boomed, but, thanks to his efforts, I am now aware of VroniPlag Wiki, “a crowdsourced collaboration established to ferret out and expose plagiarism in German dissertations.” Boy, do those Volk know how to have fun.

Go beyond online sleuthing and you come to something older and infinitely odder: the plagiarism hound whose very snarling is a work of art. The name Ivan Goncharov does not appear in “Strikingly Similar,” and that’s a pity, because he shakes up every discussion of the plagiaristic impulse. Goncharov’s fame rests solidly on “Oblomov,” his 1859 novel about a man so steeped in apathy that one of his heroic endeavors consists of simply getting out of bed. Less well known is “An Uncommon Story,” which was written some years before Goncharov died, in 1891, and not published until 1924. The book is mad, and all the madder for being unsmilingly sincere. The method of the madness is plain: Goncharov claims to have been plagiarized, with ever greater cunning and mendacity, by Ivan Turgenev, who once had been his friend. Specifically, “Home of the Gentry,” Turgenev’s most graceful novel, is said to have been extruded, without shame, from Goncharov’s “Malinovka Heights,” despite the fact—and this is where the pathology of jealousy grows truly inspired—that the latter came out ten years after the former. To Goncharov, the inconvenient chronology proves his point; in conversation, he says, he had freely mentioned his plans for various characters and concepts, only for Turgenev to squirrel them away and then plant them in his own fiction, making sure to publish first, and thus preëmpting charges of plagiarism. Dastardly! See how the Devil works:

I only gradually came to wake up to the idea that Turgenev was spreading lies about me: that he was in fact going around telling people that he had been recounting his stories to me, and that I was envious of him and I was the one who was spreading rumours and slander about him—instead of the other way round—when it was he who was exploiting my goodwill.

Got that? By rights, “An Uncommon Story” should be unreadable, yet it is saved by the sheer stamina of its arraignment. No sadness mars the purity of its paranoia. In the mouth of a master like Goncharov, crying foul at the sight—or, at any rate, the perception—of plagiarism acquires an astounding verve. Stolen jewels can do wonders for the imagination, even if they are tucked away in a safe.

Is there such a thing as good plagiarism? Can you sin your way into redemption? Academically, no; the call for honest and accurate citation of one’s sources will, and must, ring out as forcefully as ever. The blandishments of digital reproduction, whereby cutting and pasting is less bother than blowing your nose, and smart glasses can be instructed to photograph whatever lies within your vision, do not augur well, and the penultimate page of “Strikingly Similar” finds Kreuz in dark prophetic mode. “The consumption of intellectual property without paying for it,” he writes, “may function as a gateway drug that normalizes the act of appropriation.”

If that is the shape of things to come, it will be comically hard to police. Give me raiders of the lost past, any day, and forgive them their lack of footnotes. I remember listening to “Bedtime Stories,” Madonna’s 1994 album, and being surprised by a moony track called “Love Tried to Welcome Me,” which contains the lines “But my soul drew back, / Guilty of lust and sin.” This is an unacknowledged but unmistakable nod to George Herbert, one of the most enduring religious poets of the early seventeenth century, who wrote a magnificent poem that begins “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” How Herbert, who was an Anglican priest of surpassing gentleness, might have felt about being quoted, three and a half centuries later, by somebody with a Catholic name and a conical bra we shall, alas, never know. The most gratifying irony is that, in changing the mortally ashen “dust” to the cheaper and more obvious “lust,” Madonna proved only that Herbert wrote better lyrics than she did, and I can’t help wishing that she had turned to him more often for guidance both verbal and spiritual. Papa does preach.

The safest form of plagiarism, by common consent, is self-plagiarism. Only the very determined would have the courage to sue themselves, although I’m sure that Goncharov would have got around to it eventually. Kreuz allows himself a brief interlude on the matter, breezing past rumors of self-plagiarism in the work of Kelly Clarkson and Puccini before bumping into the saintly figure of Charles M. Schulz, and, in particular, into a Snoopy strip from 1996 that was, Kreuz tells us, barely distinguishable from an earlier one, from 1987. Good grief! Is that it? Could it be that self-plagiarism, far from being a lapse into rote and repetition, is practiced by every writer, composer, and painter of the first rank? Borrowing your own creations, investing them anew, and turning a fresh profit is the business of the alchemical few. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” we hear as “All You Need Is Love” begins to fade, the Beatles summoning the spectre of their younger selves from all of four years before. (It must have felt like four lifetimes.) And the lover and his lass who pass over the green cornfield, in the springtime of “As You Like It,” are recollected, deathlessly, in the flowing figure of Perdita, in “The Winter’s Tale”:

This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward: nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place.

We have a word, in English, for self-plagiarizing so habitual, and so fruitfully evergreen, that it becomes the mark—the smack, if you will—by which an artist is recognized and loved. We call it style. ♦

This week’s story, “Floating,” opens when a woman and a man meet and there’s a seemingly instant connection between them. Do you think that kind of immediate attraction is common or rare?

The narrator dumps a lot on someone she doesn’t know. “Mom and Dad divorced. My sister died. Pills.” That’s something you tell someone ten dates in. What surprises her is he stayed there, and listened. Someone who can hold all that is someone worth finding out about.

The woman is the narrator of the story, and throughout the story we see her trying to figure out this man. Could he be a love interest? Is he even single? How many clues did he give her?

When people like you they don’t leave you to figure them out.

The narrator is fifty years old and divorced. After her marriage ended, she imagined there’d be plenty of opportunities to date and have fun, but she finds that on dates all the men say they want to have children or get married. She contrasts this with her twenties, when any mention of children would drive someone away fast. Is she amused or angered or saddened by this?

I think she feels grief.

It is not true that there aren’t opportunities for her to date or have fun now that she’s fifty and divorced. They don’t like her so they tell her they want children. If you tell someone you’re fifty and divorced, and they like you, they say, “That’s hot,” because it is.

She learns both that the man has gone travelling and that he lives with his girlfriend. Any new piece of information gives her the opportunity to speculate further. Does he retain a kind of power because he remains unknown and unknowable? Or does his power diminish the more she learns about him?

The way the story is put together is interesting. It’s entirely built out of conversations she hasn’t been in or had, bits and pieces of gossip that trickle out to her. I could have written the story from the point of view of the girlfriend, or the man’s point of view, or her friend, or the man’s friends or co-workers. But there is something so wonderful about being fifty and having your own job and having been through so many disappointments that a situation like this is filtered through different experiences and people—the narrator’s discernment has an incredible clarity.

How hard is it to write a love story? Does it involve a suspension of belief?

“Love at first sight” is a difficult line to build a story around because you have to get a reader to believe it. It’s so corny and such a cliché. How do you not laugh out loud? It will be hard to deliver this line with a straight face when I go and record this at the sound studio.

It’s hard to write a love story the way I do it, because in the end you know you don’t get anyone but yourself. And I insist that is a love worth having.

You published your first novel last fall, “Pick a Color,” which is about a woman named Ning who runs a nail salon. She spends her day observing the salon’s customers and the women who work there. What would she make of your narrator?

Ning would say to her co-worker, “Floating. Huh. Love at first sight. They all say that. This one doesn’t even know when a man doesn’t like her,” and we, the reader, would be in on that conversation because it’s a book that asks us to pretend that the English language right in front of us is not there. ♦

Few sandwiches in the pantheon of great sandwiches have attained the status of the Italian combo. This hero of heroes goes by many names—the Italian sub, the Godfather, the surname of any number of Italian American icons—but it is, in its Platonic form, a long roll stuffed with cured Italian meats, plus cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced onion, oil, and red-wine vinegar. When well executed, it is one of the few sandwiches that achieve what I can only call completeness: a sandwich that wants for nothing, that is, in every sense, enough. I have eaten more Italian combos than I can count, and more than most people I know; if I am not one-tenth soppressata by body weight, it’s not for lack of trying. And yet my favorite Italian sandwich in New York City—maybe my favorite sandwich, period—contains no meat whatsoever.

That sandwich is the Vegitalian combo, from Court Street Grocers, the unbearably charming Carroll Gardens sandwich shop that opened in 2010 and now has additional locations in Williamsburg and Manhattan. Its owners, Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross, are sandwich freaks in the best possible way; on the shop’s vast menu, not a single sandwich is a dud. This achievement can only be the product of an obsessive, near-philosophical approach to the sandwich as a composition, to the gestalt of the bite. On its face, the Vegitalian is a provocation: a meatless Italian sub, a contradiction in terms, a thing that should not work and yet absolutely does. Court Street makes a traditional meat-filled Italian combo as well, which is fine, but only the Vegitalian is my favorite.

What makes me love it with such evangelical intensity is what it has taught me about the true meaning of its salumi-filled counterpart. Sandwich aficionados will spend happy hours yelling at one another about the proper cold cuts for an Italian combo, debating with Talmudic intensity the relative merits of soppressata versus capicola, or whether to include a layer of mortadella (nice, in my opinion) or prosciutto (never; a textural abomination). But the Vegitalian renders all of those arguments entirely moot, by evoking all the best parts of a meat-laden sandwich meatlessly. What’s important isn’t the meat itself but what it provides: heft, bite, umami, complexity, funk, fat. In the hands of a sandwich master, these things can come from elsewhere—in the Vegitalian, thin slabs of fresh mozzarella and, of all things, a thick layer of roasted sweet-potato slices.

The alchemy of any given sandwich is both specific and forgiving. Its stacked ingredients merge and mingle—you can swap out this or that, as long as whatever replaces it serves a similar role. In the Vegitalian, the sweet potato, with its happy mushiness, has a surprisingly similar yielding texture to a ruffled heap of thinly sliced deli meats, and its subtle sweetness evokes that of many salumi. Not immaterially, its bright-orange color looks absolutely gorgeous against the rest of the sandwich. (In a previous iteration, the sandwich was made with sliced butternut squash, which to me more closely mimicked the mouthfeel of deli meat; sweet potato makes the sandwich squishier and less tidy, which offers its own pleasures.)

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. To be fair, all these components are present in Court Street Grocers’ standard Italian combo, too—but the result, in that case, is less adjacent to perfection, with too many strong notes competing for the same frequencies.

What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself. ♦

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Souvankham Thammavongsa read her story “Floating,” from the March 30, 2026, issue of the magazine. Thammavongsa has published four volumes of poetry, as well as the story collection “How to Pronounce Knife” and the novel “Pick a Color,” both of which were winners of the Giller Prize.

I had not noticed him. He came to stand in front of me, and asked if I was nervous, doing that, talking in front of people. He said he’d seen me looking at my notes, practicing. I do this all the time, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I said, “I was nervous, but once I’m talking, I am fine.” He asked me if I taught, like my friend whom he knew from work. I spoke in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t laugh or giggle when he wasn’t funny. I told him about my family. Mom and Dad divorced. My sister died. Pills. I was probably never going to see this man again, I thought. No reason not to just say stuff like this to him. What would he care?

He told me his name. I couldn’t pronounce it, and had to try a few times. There was a comfort and ease to him that I liked. I liked that he talked. Asking questions like a grown man should. It wasn’t as if I had to work to get him to say something. He was present and alert. He listened.

We didn’t talk to anyone else there.

What happened around us, I didn’t notice, just that the room began to clear.

We drifted away from each other, and he noticed. He rushed over to give me a hug. He ran, quick little steps and then a small leap. “Oh,” I said, making sure that nothing below our waists touched. I didn’t know his situation. He hadn’t mentioned anyone when we talked. They don’t mention them sometimes, so they can keep talking to you. Still, he probably wasn’t single, because he never tried to get my number.

He then turned his head to ask if my friend would bring me along to dinner with him one evening, just the four of us. My friend and his husband, and me, and him. That’s four. So maybe there wasn’t a girlfriend. Otherwise, she would be counted in. Also, maybe he didn’t ask for my number because he wasn’t someone who jumped into things—he had to get to know a person first.

After he left, I said to my friend, “I like him. Is he single?” My friend said he’d never mentioned a partner.

There’d been snow earlier, but it had stopped. I stood, alone, waiting for the bus. It was dark. I lived in this neighborhood about two years ago. Across the street there was a coffee shop, where I used to buy a breakfast sandwich before work. It had shut down now. And a few doors from that was the small grocery store that always had yellow guavas from Mexico. Also, just over there was the pizza place where my ex-husband and I had our last fight. I’d wanted to take a trip. Someplace warm, where there was a beach.

I had a job, but it didn’t pay as well as his did. It had been just the two of us, and he made enough from his job to take care of both of us. Almost six figures. But I guess that doesn’t go a long way these days in a city like this.

Or maybe when you make that kind of money, it’s a burden to carry everything. What would happen if he got sick, and couldn’t work? he’d ask. Or, if he lost his job because of cutbacks? That’s happening everywhere. He was right, what I made wasn’t a lot of money compared with what he made.

My mom and dad, together, made as much when I was growing up as I was making then. But we were what people call poor. I looked down at my winter boots with their felt lining and rubber soles. When I was a kid, I wore tennis shoes made of thin cotton fabric. I spent months asking for a new pair because my big toe was beginning to poke out on the left one. A new pair had cost five dollars.

Maybe when you make that kind of money, you just don’t want to share. It wasn’t equal, he said.

I quickly reminded myself that I was not married to him anymore. I’d got out of it. But I heard his voice in my head and I remembered the feeling of being yelled at. I held my breath even though it was just a memory.

He had yelled, “We need money for stuff like that!” at the pizza place, as if we were people who couldn’t make the monthly payment and were about to lose our house to the bank. I thought we were doing fine. Maybe more than fine. We had leftovers in the fridge, a car with good tires, and a house on a street with trees. But he was always worried about having more.

A few men at the pizza place turned around to see if I was all right, to check if this was a situation where they might be called on to step in. He looked over at them, and then whispered to me, “You make me feel like a jerk!” It was because I didn’t yell back to match his volume that he seemed so loud. I made as much as my mom and dad combined when I was kid, I wanted to say. I was proud of that. But I could tell it wasn’t something I should be proud of.

I just sat there and lowered my head and let the tears drop down my face and wiped at them when they got to my chin. I didn’t want to wipe higher, near my eyes. People were looking at me, and I didn’t want them to know I was crying.

I hadn’t been with anyone since we divorced. Well, I had, but it was only for a few months. Doesn’t really count. He was in his early thirties and he didn’t have much experience, but he was so excited. I was like a man in a midlife crisis, liking them younger than me. He thought he could text at two in the morning and just come over, and, well, I let him, because I knew it wasn’t going to last. Just some fun. Still, when he started dating someone else, which I also knew was going to happen, I was sad about it.

I thought that when I got divorced there would be plenty of opportunities to date and have fun experiences. A new season of bloom. But so many of the men want children now. Or they want to get married. Or they expect me to provide.

When I was in my twenties, and had plenty of time to have children, I was careful not to bring it up. Pressure. Didn’t want to do that to anyone. It was a quick way to make a man become uninterested. It would make them run. I couldn’t call drinking coffee together a date. If I did, I would be reminded that we were just friends. I wanted things too soon, too fast.

Never mind saying anything about marriage. People back then, at that age, just weren’t ready. What about a career? Now that I am fifty, they all tell me they want to get married. And they want babies, too. I’m not someone you introduce to your friends or bring home to your mother anymore. I will never give her grandchildren to dote on. It’s too late for stuff like that.

A few weeks passed, and it was still snowing. My friend tried to set up that dinner date. But, it turned out, the man was travelling for four months. He wasn’t going to be back until the summer. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

Maybe he isn’t interested, I thought. Four months from now is a long time. He’s in his fifties, too. A grown man. Why doesn’t he know where he will be or what he will be doing? He can’t pen something in a calendar and work around that? He’s a man with a steady job, a schedule. Shouldn’t he know enough about his life to choose one night for dinner with friends?

“He might be going through some stuff, in his personal life,” my friend said. “You never know.”

A month after this, my friend texted me and said that we should go for a walk now that the weather was better. There was so much sun. He’d found out some news. “So I told him that you like him. He said the night he met you and talked to you, he was just floating. He’d never felt that way before. He said, for him, it was love at first sight! This man loves you. And he said he could try to be friends with you, but he can’t be friends because he’s attracted to you. He can’t even be friends!”

I wasn’t as excited.

What did it mean that a man in his fifties had never felt this way before? It’s kind of late in life to have these feelings be new. Did he just never date a woman he liked before? Did he just go with the ones who texted first, arranged the dates, picked the restaurants? Who, two months later, still answered texts, even though he’d disappeared for a while, and never asked what happened?

I had to ask, “But is he someone who wants to float?” Some people don’t want that. They have to stay grounded—can’t get carried away. Was he like that?

“Oh, and he lives with a woman and he pays the mortgage,” my friend said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do about that. She’s not travelling with him, so maybe they’re not serious.”

I don’t know. A mortgage is serious. They are hard to get, and even harder to get out of.

It was true—four months was a long time to be away from someone you loved. He was having experiences without her. Did he invite her along and she didn’t want to go? Or did he tell her that this trip was something he needed, alone?

Also, if he already had someone, shouldn’t he not say things like that out loud? Sure. We meet other people and we’re attracted to them, but we keep that to ourselves if we’re in something already. Now that it had been said aloud, did that mean that he’d do something about it?

I asked my friend, “If your husband said, ‘I’m travelling for four months alone,’ what would you do?” My friend said, “Oh, we’re just broken up then.”

Exactly, I thought.

“Aren’t you happy? This man feels this way about you!”

I didn’t think it was something to be happy about. It was just words. People can say all kinds of things to let you down easy. Not a lot of people get together for love. You get older, and you just hope that someone is there in the middle of the night.

A few months passed. It was summer. The herbs on the balcony grew tall and leafy. I learned more bits about him. The woman he was with. He complained about her. Enough that some close friends of his said, “It’s not going to last.” And no one from work had met her. “Does she even exist?” someone joked. She didn’t have a job. I wondered, Was it because she didn’t want to work? Was she wealthy and she didn’t have to? Or was it because he demanded that she be at his beck and call? That is like a full-time job.

But didn’t she want her own money? To buy the things she wanted? Maybe he shared everything with her. What was his was hers, too. Maybe that was why he could go on a trip alone for four months. She couldn’t really say anything, because she felt she couldn’t stop him. “He’s never dated someone age-appropriate before,” my friend said. “They’re always in their twenties.” We didn’t know how old his girlfriend was, but she was probably in her twenties. It’s embarrassing to bring someone that age around.

The fall came, and he never did get in touch. Why would he? It’s safer to be with someone you’re already certain you have. He didn’t even know me. I wouldn’t be impressed that he had a job, because I had one, too. In a few months, I might find him boring. And then he would have given up a safe and sure thing.

“It was good that he went on this solo trip right after he met you. You could exist for him,” my friend said. If he was at home living his life, going through their daily routines, sitting down for meals, asking her to pass the salt, he would push what I could be somewhere else. He wouldn’t be able to daydream, to let his thoughts drift. “Honestly, four months! He probably fucked a bunch of people. A good-looking guy like that. They come up to him over there,” my friend said. He saw my disappointed face, and he added, “Oh, it just means it’s good for you! He’s not too attached. What’s he coming back to?”

I wondered about the woman who’d waited for him to come back. Did she worry? Did she think he was sleeping with other people? They hadn’t even been together a year. But, whatever they were, he was already paying the mortgage. Maybe when someone is paying for stuff like that, you just let them do what they want. As long as they come back and wash between their legs.

“He’s had some health problems. He has to have surgery. I don’t know what it is, though. He didn’t say. It seemed private. So I didn’t get the details,” my friend said.

In your fifties, for a man, that is probably prostate cancer, I suggested. If it wasn’t serious, he would say so. An appendix. A benign tumor. Tonsils. A root canal. You don’t have to be secret about those things. When you are dealing with your health you don’t think of love. You think about stability. About the person who will help you to the bathroom, wipe you when you can’t make it to the toilet, clean and bandage you because you can’t bend at the right angle to reach the wound. “If that’s the case,” my friend said, “you don’t want a botched one,” and glanced at his own crotch, and shuddered.

Except it wasn’t cancer. It was knee surgery. A doctor had talked him into having it early. “He’s having a hard time recovering. He was swimming and playing tennis before the surgery, but now he’s just in so much pain,” my friend said. Having a partner at this time is important, otherwise you’d have to hire a nurse. A private full-time one is expensive, and even then it’s not like being looked after by someone who loves you. Men are practical people. They aren’t going to chase after someone they love at first sight. They will stay with the person who will take care of them. And I haven’t proved I could be that.

“He e-mailed me, asking about a naturopath,” my friend said. “For his partner. She has insomnia.” I thought of not being able to sleep. How you try all kinds of things. Silk pillows, earplugs, listening to the sound of rain. Why couldn’t she find a naturopath for herself? Anyway, that is not a man who is interested in other women if he’s looking into getting help for her. That’s someone who loves her.

Maybe when he got back, she was glad he came home. She didn’t say anything or worry about what he’d done away from her so long. Cool with it, is what she was. Why couldn’t I be easy in that way? I wasn’t anything to him and here I was feeling as if I should be angry that he travelled somewhere for four months alone—that he’d had experiences and made memories without me.

I always thought that when you love someone—when you say that you fell in love at first sight—it will become something. You’ll pursue it because you might not ever feel that again. Maybe that’s too hard. The idea of losing someone important to you is too great a risk, so you never make anyone important to you. A person who doesn’t have a job, who couldn’t pay the mortgage on her own, is someone you wouldn’t worry about running off. You could trust she’d be there when you got back.

She might sense that something was off. “How come it isn’t like it was in the beginning?” she might ask. “This is just how relationships evolve,” he might say to her. “This is mature,” he’d add.

Why wasn’t she worried that his friends didn’t know about her? Why wasn’t she afraid about not working, about his family thinking she was lazy, living off him and his money? I worry about these things for her, even though it is not my life. No one ever says this, but it is hard work, too, being alone. When you are young, you think that the people who say they love you actually do. That forever might still have time to play out.

He said that I made him float. In the cartoons, you hold on to a bunch of balloons, and it just takes you into the sky. You can go anywhere, and nothing bad can happen to you. In real life, floating happens in water. You trust that you can lean back farther and farther and there’s something about water and how it works, that you can lift your feet and there you go. It happens. You float.

When I was four, my mother tried to teach me to swim. She carried me out into a lake, but when she put me in the water I sank. I ended up feeling the bottom with my feet. The water was deep. I saw a bunch of small black dots moving toward me. Tadpoles. I was greedy. I thought I could have them all, and I grabbed and grabbed, but I had nothing to put them in. ♦